Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  For most prose, at all events, there is a good deal in Defoe’s view of what style should be: ‘I would answer, that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, idiots or lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all.’ This is, indeed, very like the verdict of Anatole France on the three most important qualities of French style: ‘d’abord la clarté, puis encore la clarté, et enfin la clarté.’ [55] Poetry, and poetic prose, may sometimes gain by a looming mystery like that of mountain-cloud or thunderstorm; but ordinary prose, I think, is happiest when it is clear as the air of a spring day in Attica.

  True, obscurity cannot always be avoided. It is impossible to make easy the ideas of an Einstein, or the psychology of a Proust. But even abstruse subjects are often made needlessly difficult; for instance, by the type of philosopher who, sometimes from a sound instinct of self-preservation, consistently refuses to illustrate his meaning by examples; or by the type of scientific writer who goes decked out with technical jargon as an Indian brave with feathers. Most obscurity is an unmixed, and unnecessary, evil.

  It may be caused by incoherence; by inconsiderateness; by overcrowding of ideas; by pomp and circumstance; by sheer charlatanism; and doubtless by other things I have not thought of.

  The obscurity of incoherence may come from fumbling with thoughts, or from fumbling with words; but generally the two go together. After all, even our unspoken thinking is largely done with words. ‘J’ai toujours tâché,’ says the ironic Fontenelle, ‘de m’entendre.’ [56] But some men have not much wish, and some not much power, to understand themselves. It is not impossible that even these should write well; but it is unlikely. Nor is it enough that individual sentences should be clear; the result may still be chaos, unless they are also clearly connected.

  The obscurity of inconsiderateness is often due to egotism – to an absent-minded assumption that one’s own knowledge must be shared by others. Browning, having familiarized himself, for Sordello, with the state of medieval Lombardy, tended to take for granted a like familiarity in his readers. The use of too technical language may arise from a similar reason; or from the baser one of mere pretentiousness.

  The obscurity of overcrowding arises from trying to say too many things at once. It may come from having too many ideas and, like Juliet’s Nurse, too little sense of relevance. A writer, I think, should be prepared ruthlessly to reject even his brightest inspirations, if they lure him off his line of argument [57] – unless, of course, like Montaigne he is deliberately letting his mind ramble in an easy chair. There the result can be happy; but with Coleridge, for example, fertile in associations but weak in self-control, too often it is not. His conceptions become, to use his own image, like Surinam toads flopping along with toadlets sprouting all over them. Meredith, again, used metaphor ‘to avoid the long-winded’; but it was not always very good for the metaphors. Or trouble may spring from being, not too fond of one’s own ideas, but too unsure of them. This is often noticeable in young writers. After launching out into a sentence, they are seized by sudden misgivings and add qualification after qualification, in subordinate clauses, as they go. It would often be better to think again; to put aside the second thoughts that are not really necessary; and to postpone those that are necessary, to separate sentences. [58] Hitler’s principle of ‘One at a time’ may often serve as well in writing as it served him in politics (till he broke it by invading the East before he had finished with the West). Many Renaissance writers, indeed, emulous of Cicero and Livy, were tempted to build their sentences into mazes and labyrinths, where they sometimes lost both themselves and their readers. No doubt a long period can show fine architecture; but there may be more ease, clarity, and point in more compact constructions, like Voltaire’s. Besides, as he so wisely said, ‘l’art d’ennuyer est de tout dire.’ [59]

  Il y avait dans le voisinage un derviche très fameux qui passait pour le meilleur philosophe de la Turquie; ils allèrent le consulter; Pangloss porta la parole, et lui dit: Maître, nous venons vous prier de nous dire pourquoi un aussi étrange animal que l’homme a été formé.

  De quoi te mêles-tu? lui dit le derviche; est-ce là ton affaire? Mais, mon révérend père, dit Candide, il y a horriblement de mal sur la terre. Qu’importe, dit le derviche, qu’il y ait du mal ou du bien? Quand sa hautesse envoie un vaisseau en Égypte, s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans la vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non? Que faut-il donc faire? dit Pangloss. Te taire, dit le derviche. Je me flattais, dit Pangloss, de raisonner un peu avec vous des effets et des causes, du meilleur des mondes possibles, de l’origine du mal, de la nature de l’âme et de l’harmonie préétablie. Le derviche, à ces mots, leur ferma la porte au nez. [60]

  To some simple folk this may seem contemptibly simple. Let them try to equal it. The sentences frisk past like little goblins, with eyes as bright as fire; as lively today as the day they were born. It is not, thank Heaven, the only way of writing; variety is a virtue of prose less important only than clarity; but what a good way of writing it is! Only you will not find much of it in the critical journals that guard, like long-tailed and scaly dragons, the golden fruit of literature.

  Paragraphs, too, like sentences, can cause obscurity by being overloaded or overlong. But whereas a long sentence, if well built, may have a certain dignity, few readers are likely to seek, or find, any particular dignity in a long paragraph. Indeed, paragraphs, at least in prose, seem usually things of convenience rather than of beauty. At each paragraph-end the reader can draw breath for an instant, and rest. The essential is that he should also feel it a rational place to rest – that the paragraph, in other words, should seem a unity. The considerate writer will not make such rests too rare. Short paragraphs make for ease and clarity. No doubt, if they are too short, the effect tends to become snippety, and the reader may feel he is being treated as a half-wit. And, here too, monotony can only be avoided by variety. But in case of doubt it is safer, I think, to risk making paragraphs too short than too long. ‘Divide et impera.’

  The obscurity of pomp, though often pretentious, is not always so; the author may be striving, like Sir Thomas Browne, to dignify, not himself, but his theme. For me, criticism is lost in delight when I read in his Christian Morals such curiosities as ‘move circumspectly, not meticulously, and rather carefully sollicitous than anxiously sollicitudinous’; or ‘forget not how assuefaction unto anything minorates the passion from it, how constant Objects loose their hints, and steal an inadvertisement upon us’; [61] or ‘he who thus still advanceth in Iniquity deepeneth his deformed hue; turns a Shadow into Night, and makes himself a Negro in the black Jaundice’. For these are sublime absurdities; one sees Sir Thomas rubbing his hands with delight at that vision of an Ethiop made yet inkier by a ‘black Jaundice’. One may, indeed, doubt if Christian Morals ever added a millimetre to anyone’s moral stature; the homeliest adage on a porridge-bowl might be more effective. But this queer genius who imagined himself moralist, scientist, and antiquarian, was really an artist to the bone; it mattered little what he wrote about; vulgar errors, urns, quincunces – all turned in his hands to the music and fantasy of an enchanted island.

  Still, one Christian Morals is enough for a literature. Sir Thomas is hardly for imitation; and with most writers, whether philosophers, scientists, lawyers, or critics, the obscurity of pomp becomes merely a tiresome and ridiculous nuisance – like Addison’s pedant: ‘Upon enquiry I found my learned friend had dined that day with Mr. Swan, the famous punster; and desiring [62] him to give me some account of Mr. Swan’s conversation, he told me that he generally talked in the Paronomasia, that he sometimes gave in to the Plocé, but that in his humble opinion he shone most in the Antanaclasis.’

  Similarly when some modern expounder of the beauties of literature tells us that ‘the whole object of studying poetry is the reader’s imaginative integration’, or that ‘we can only speculate on the steps by which
James moved from the more limited thematic substance of The Golden Bowl to the more extreme polarisation of The Princess Casamassima’, it is usually wise to shut the book. Half the essays that I read can never say that a work has ‘unity’; ritual demands that it should have ‘organic unity’. I do not know how many of the writers understand what ‘organic’ means; not, I suspect, very many. But it seems to me by now a tired metaphor and tedious formula, which might well enjoy a rest. Why not say simply ‘unity’?

  The obscurity of pomp is, indeed, next neighbour to the obscurity of charlatanism, which has so long thrived, and no doubt will long continue to thrive, on the human passion for being mystified; as with the parish-beadle who was asked his opinion of a sermon: ‘I watna, sir, it was rather o’er-plain and simple for me. I like thae sermons bae that joombles the joodgement and confounds the sense.’ Similarly Coleridge’s father delighted his flock with Biblical texts in Hebrew, ‘the immediate language of the Holy Ghost’; and preachers less erudite have made shift at least with Latin – even if they used only Latin rules for gender from the grammar-book. ‘Mascula quae maribus’ rang just as sonorously in rustic ears. We may recall, too, how a parish-clerk applied to Cowper to write some verses for the Christmas bill of mortality, because the local bard, a monumental mason, ‘is a gentleman of so much reading, that the people of our town cannot understand him’.

  Far earlier, in ancient Alexandria, Lycophron had produced his enigmatic Alexandra, a poem employing some three thousand words of which ‘five hundred and eighteen are found nowhere else and one hundred and seventeen appear for the first time’. And in the first century of the Roman Empire, Quintilian mocks at the obscurantism fashionable in his day: ‘We think ourselves geniuses if it takes genius to understand us.’ He records a teacher of rhetoric whose watchword to his pupils was ‘σκότισον’ – ‘make it dark’; and whose highest praise was the climax, ‘Splendid! I can’t understand it myself!’ But it would be sanguine to assume that modern man has grown less gullible. ‘Eh! mon Dieu,’ the Goncourts record Zola exclaiming, ‘je me moque comme vous de ce mot “naturalisme”, et cependant je le répéterai, parce qu’il faut un baptême aux choses, pour que le public les croie neuves.’ [63]

  Clarity, of course, has its limitations and its dangers. First, do not count on your readers to be grateful. I remember how, after taking a good deal of pains to make as lucid as possible a small manual on Tragedy, I had from a spy in Girton a report of the verdict of one of its readers there: ‘Quite good, you know; but so simple!’

  Secondly – and more important – both poetry and poetic prose may, as I have said, loom larger in a dimmer light; as Macbeth gains by scene after scene of literal darkness. Who could better the horror of ‘To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot’? Indeed it is one of the difficulties of translating Aeschylus or Dante that the translation tends, by being clearer, to lose the more shadowy grandeur of the original.

  Mallarmé, again, could come to Heredia with the disarming appeal: ‘Je viens de faire une pièce superbe, mais je n’en comprends pas bien le sens, et je viens vous trouver pour que vous me l’expliquiez.’ [64] But when I read of him also asking for a copy of the notes taken down during one of his discourses, in order ‘to put a little obscurity into it’, I must own that, if this remark was meant seriously, I cannot take it very seriously. It remains always a little too easy to be difficult.

  Yet even for ordinary prose there may sometimes be, as Burke suggested, a lack of strength in a language too lucid. It may seem dull, uninspired, prosaic. The less conscious levels of the mind may remain unstirred. Corot, it is said, would knock off work at nine in the morning – ‘Everything can be seen now – so there’s nothing to see.’ Certainly it is not much use making your reader see, if you also make him yawn; therefore it is necessary not only to make all things clear, but also, if possible, to make all things new.

  Still, after all, this challenge has often been met. The verse of Milton and Racine, the prose of Burke himself and Chateaubriand can hardly be called obscure; [65] but still less can they be called mean. There is nothing insipid in the clarity of Goldsmith or Landor or Macaulay [66] at their best; or in the talk of Johnson; or in the letters of Dorothy Osborne and Horace Walpole. If lucid prose seems sometimes too prosaic, as with Locke and hundreds of smaller men, it is probably because the writer’s personality was itself prosaic.

  Prose may not have the measured march of poetry; it uses poetic diction only at its peril; but one essential resource of poetry it can share – metaphor. No doubt, too poetic metaphors are dangerous; and worn-out metaphors, dying of old age, are deadening; but it is for the prose-writer’s imagination to find images that are neither. Purists and puritans who would deny these to prose are shearing the locks of Samson. Already Aristotle saw this (Rhetoric, III, 2): ‘The most powerful thing both in verse and in prose, as we have already said in the Poetics, [67] is metaphor. And there is the more need to take loving care about this in prose, because prose has fewer resources than verse. Metaphor gives, above all, three advantages – clarity, delightfulness, unfamiliarity. And none can borrow this gift from another.’ But metaphor – with simile – seems to me so much the life of style that it must be dealt with later at more length. [68]

  And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them. Most obscurity, I suspect, comes not so much from incompetence as from ambition – the ambition to be admired for depth of sense, or pomp of sound, or wealth of ornament. It is for the writer to think and rethink his ideas till they are clear; to put them in a clear order; to prefer (other things equal, and subject to the law of variety) short words, sentences, and paragraphs; not to try to say too many things at once; to eschew irrelevances; and, above all, to put himself with imaginative sympathy in his reader’s place. Everyone knows of Molière reading his plays to his cook; eight centuries before him, in distant China, Po Chu-i had done the like; and Swift’s Dublin publisher, Faulkner, would similarly read proofs aloud to him and two of his men-servants – ‘which, if they did not comprehend, he would alter and amend, until they understood it perfectly well’. In short, it is usually the pretentious and the egotistic who are obscure, especially in prose; those who write with wider sympathy, to serve some purpose beyond themselves, must usually be muddy-minded creatures if they cannot, or will not, be clear.

  A Note on Italics

  Italics are, in their small way, a contribution to clarity; yet they sometimes incur disapproval. ‘One should so arrange one’s sentences,’ it is argued, ‘that the meaning is clear without these contrivances.’ By parity of reasoning we should abolish marks of interrogation or exclamation (‘shriek-marks’ I have heard them called); for one can so arrange one’s sentences that the meaning is clear without these contrivances either. Indeed, why not dispense with commas too? The ancients did; and modern lawyers do, when they draft a will.

  The answer seems to me that writing is merely a substitute for speech. (Indeed, Goethe called it ‘an abuse of speech’.) It is, then, simply a matter of commonsense convenience what symbols we use in writing to indicate how the words should be spoken.

  There is all the difference in tone between ‘You are satisfied with what you have done?’ and ‘You are satisfied with what you have done!’ In speech, this difference is conveyed by the voice; in writing, by the punctuation. But if exclamation-marks had not been invented, it might become necessary, unless the context made all clear, to replace the second by some clumsy periphrasis like ‘You surely do not mean to say that you are satisfied with what you have done?’

  It might indeed be argued that we could usefully have still more typographical devices to bring writing closer to speech, and the reader nearer to the writer’s intentions. Thus Dr. Erasmus Darwin suggested that irony might be indicated by some symbol like ‘a note of admiration inverted’! And it is perhaps surprising that fastidious poets have not evolved more of a
notation to mark exactly how their verses should be recited; as musicians have, to mark how they should be sung. I do not myself hanker in the least for either of these additions to our stock of symbols; but I should be sorry to see that stock diminished by the abolition of italics as a mark of emphasis.

  ‘We look at that familiar old tomb,’ writes Thackeray, ‘and think how the seats are altered since we were here, and how the doctor – not the present doctor, the doctor of our time – used to sit yonder, and his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys, [69] on whom it lighted; and how the boy next us would kick our shins during service time, and how the monitor would cane us afterwards because our shins were kicked.’ And when Wells’s hero sees asleep the plump lady at the Potwell Inn, ‘ “My sort,” said Mr. Polly.’ To remove the italics in these passages would lose clarity: to reword them would lose brevity.

  No doubt, it is dangerously easy to fall into excess; as Arnold sometimes employed in his verse an excess of exclamation-marks; and Queen Victoria in her letters, an excess of underlining. [70] But this occasional abuse of useful things seems to me far from justifying their general abolition.